I tried out my new camera along one of the beaches at Sleeping Bear Dunes. Cotton wood trees survive here in the migrating sand because they can grow new root systems higher up on their stems as needed.
Archives for artform
Making paper one’s own: tinting
Painting From Life vs. From Photos
Tinting paper is the fastest and least expensive ways to ‘make’ paper. One begins with a ready-made sheet, but then makes it one’s own. more… »
Orientation
I revisited one of the places I like to photograph and came back with, among others, the image shown above. No, it was not the scene of junkyard treasure, and this is not the side of a beat-up old car. It’s actually from my ghost town site, and it’s the side of a beat-up old outhouse. I guess I took it because I tend to like abstracts like this. Though that’s probably not the whole story, because this is the only abstract I made in hours of photographing in a place loaded with weathered wood, ancient mining equipment, etc. Perhaps I was drawn to it through mysterious workings of my unconscious. If so, I discovered why the next day — but maybe you can guess it now?
Why does art change with viewing?
Painting From Life vs. From Photos
Drawings, paintings and photographs all seem to be more or less static entities. With luck, they can last more or less unchanged for hundreds of years. It is therefore interesting, if disconcerting, when artworks appear to change drastically from day to day. more… »
In the absence of sand dunes
Funny how things come together sometimes. After casting about for a while, rejecting various topic possibilities, I finally settled on one I’d had in mind for some time, although I hadn’t prepared images or written anything. After typing the title and while I was uploading images, I noticed Doug had just posted on influence. In part, this post is about what I can do here in Montana that is as much as possible like those fabulous images of California dunes (Oceano, Death Valley) by the Westons and many others (see examples here and here). I’m not exactly striving to copy, but I am deliberately letting that influence wash over me and through me. I love the forms of those high contrast black and white images, both the three-dimensional dune forms and the two-dimensional shapes in the plane. I look at those images often.
But there is another goal with my series, although I had not quite formulated it sharply until Birgit’s recent post. In addition to the dune-like undulating fields in the foreground, most of these images have the Bridger mountains in the background. But the mountains are serving not so much as subject as to bring out the light-filled air of early morning.
Chains (Jay Hoffman – guest post)
Picked up a piece of airport art at a garage sale. I believe that the lady said it was from Kenya. It is a chain, carved from a single piece of wood with a stylized head at each end.
